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If a computer were to design the perfect U.N. Secretary-General, he or she would look sonething like this: African born; European and American educated, with decades of service in the U.N. system; married to a European; and possessing a quiet charisma and calm authority as chaos arises.

That the U.N. in 1996 found such a person to restore its sense of direction and purpose was a near miracle. But out of the U.N.’s failures in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda came Kopi Annan, the career international civil servant who had participated in these disasters yet somehow survived and learned from them.

Today Annan is in the middle of his second term. His task is not finished, and the U.N. is still far from what it should be. But Annan has tested the limits of the job, accumulating more authority-one cannot use the word power, given the constraints the U.N. system places on him-than any of his predecessors.

His complex relationship with the U.S. government is little understood. When Annan takes positions in public that are displeasing to the bush administration, it unleashes its attack dogs. Yet when administration officials found their policies in Iraq floundering, they asked the U.N. for help. Some observers told Annan that he should responsibility was to the cause of stabilizing Iraq. He began to work toward the decisive date of June 30, when the u.s. will hand over control to Iraqi authorities and an uncertain situation will prevail determined by factors way beyond his, or anyone else’s, ability to control. But it is Annan’s destiny to be handed the very worst problems after they have been unsuccessfully addressed by others. Anyone who knows him knows he wades into such problems with his usual blend of courage, self-control, modesty and optimism.